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Programmers' Affinity to Languages

Authors Alvaro Costa Neto , Cristiana Araújo , Maria João Varanda Pereira , Pedro Rangel Henriques

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Author Details

Alvaro Costa Neto
  • Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of São Paulo, Barretos, Brazil
Cristiana Araújo
  • Centro ALGORITMI, Departamento de Informática, University of Minho, Campus Gualtar, Braga, Portugal
Maria João Varanda Pereira
  • Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal
Pedro Rangel Henriques
  • Centro ALGORITMI, Departamento de Informática, University of Minho, Campus Gualtar, Braga, Portugal

Funding

This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.

Cite As Get BibTex

Alvaro Costa Neto, Cristiana Araújo, Maria João Varanda Pereira, and Pedro Rangel Henriques. Programmers' Affinity to Languages. In Second International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2021). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 91, pp. 3:1-3:7, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2021.3

Abstract

Students face several challenges when learning computer programming languages, a central topic to acquire programming skills. While those challenges that present a predominantly technical nature have been intensely studied by researchers along the years, the ones that are concerned with qualitative, and personal aspects have not. Affinity to a programming language is one of the many personal factors that may contribute to surpass these qualitative aspects that describe the difficulties that students face. From this point-of-view, this paper presents a proposal for treating and studying programmers' affinity to programming languages as an important factor for learning computer programming. It also reports a preliminary questionnaire conducted on a master’s degree class at Universidade do Minho that showed that affinity may have a broader relation to learning computer programming than anticipated. Finally, a set of relevant questions are stated to compose a future inquiry aimed at deepening the knowledge on the affinity between programmers and languages, paving the way for following research.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing → Computer-assisted instruction
Keywords
  • Computer programming
  • Programming Languages
  • Affinity
  • Education
  • Learning

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References

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